The introduction to the paper lets you know that this isn’t going to be easy..

As exciting as it may sound, using the PS3 for scientiﬁc computing is a bumpy ride. Parallel programming models for multi-core processors are in their infancy, and standardized APIs are not even on the horizon. As a result, presently, only hand-written code fully exploits the hardware capabilities of the CELL processor. Ultimately, the suitability of the PS3 platform for scientiﬁc computing is most heavily impaired by the devastating disproportion between the processing power of the processor and the crippling slowness of the interconnect, explained in detail in section 9.1. Nevertheless, the CELL processor is a revolutionary chip, delivering ground-breaking performance and now available in an affordable package. We hope that this rough guide will make the ride slightly less bumpy.

Of course, it’s unlikely you’re going to see the PS3 being used in production clusters anyway, so the interconnect shouldn’t be such a problem there.. 🙂

The paper covers the hardware, Linux support and how to get it onto a PS3, programming methods and models, MPI, performance, etc. The paper isn’t complete as I write, but it is still a very interesting read. HPC folks will certainly want to read section 9.1 “Limitations of the PS 3 for Scientiﬁc Computing”, especially the part that says:

Double precision performance. Peak performance of double precision ﬂoating point arithmetic is a factor of 14 below the peak performance of single precision. Computations which demand full precision accuracy will see a peak performance of only 14 Gﬂop/s, unless mixed-precision approaches can be applied.

The Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK is running a competition offering a GBP500 prize to a winner who can correctly answer the question from China. This is because of their concerns about the poor level of mathematics that Chemistry students in the UK have:

Increasingly, universities are mounting remedial sessions for incoming science undergraduates because their maths skills are so limited, with many having stopped formal lessons in mathematics two years earlier at the GCSE level.

The Western World has been fretting about SARS and Avian Influenza for some time now, but all the while there’s been another bug that we thought we had previously conquered sitting in the wings evolving drug resistance, and it could be far deadlier.

I was wondering whether FUSE was being a bottleneck in my various ZFS-FUSEtests or whether the performance issues at present are just that ZFS is very young code on Linux and that the fact that Riccardo hasn’t yet started on optimisation.